Comment by NoSalt
1 day ago
How are these, are they worth the money? I have seen these before, but thought they might be crappy "jokes". However, if they are decent, I would love to play around with them.
1 day ago
How are these, are they worth the money? I have seen these before, but thought they might be crappy "jokes". However, if they are decent, I would love to play around with them.
"worth the money" is hard to say, especially for devices like these where the value is not really so much on the plain features as much as a more subjective factors like the design and the UI. I would say that purely based on features - probably not, especially with post-covid pricing. There are more powerful iphone or android apps for much less. Behringer, and to some degree Korg and Roland offer lower-end devices for not much more that ultimately might be more useful and usable. But, I do own a couple of these little guys and they're fun. I wouldn't call them "jokes", but calling them "toys" - in the good and bad sense - would probably not be a stretch, even if you can get some nice sounds out of them. I used to keep a couple on my desk and just jam a little with them as a distraction.
Garageband was never even half as much fun as three POs plugged together - at least for me. Same way the all the guitar effect models running on my iPad aren't nearly as much fun as stomping on the Rat Distortion or Boss Chorus pedals I bought 35 years ago.
I don't know if people younger than me, who grew up with touch screen devices, have that same affinity for physical controls over touchscreens?
[context: I have eBay’d a couple of Pocket Operators because I was curious and the price was low enough I knew I could at least break even reselling on Reverb even after fees and shipping…This is how I rationalize my gas.]
Maybe buy one and if it is not for you be ok reselling it at a loss…framing it as renting an instrument helps me.
The Pocket Operators are musical and inexpensive for musical instruments.
Like any musical instrument practice hours are how you get amazing results and whether the instrument gels with you is the biggest influence of whether you put in the hours.
For me, the Pocket Operators haven’t gelled…I just don’t enjoy them enough to put in the time. But other people find them great and I can see why (not-for-me != bad).
The pocket operators have kind of 'grown up' and now they are doing a larger format thingie that is kinda like a pocket operator: https://teenage.engineering/products/ep
I especially like the bardcore one: https://teenage.engineering/products/ep-1320
The newest one, EP-40, just came out! It's got the best specs by far and the features are a superset of the original EP-133, so it would be my strong recommendation. Unfortunately EP-1320 never received any updates so it lags behind, but hopefully they remedy that. Just don't buy hardware with hopes of unpromised future updates!
Edit: Because they don't make it totally clear- whichever one you buy, you can clear all the stock sounds and make any genre of music, regardless of the theming.
They're great, but I feel their pricing moves them out of impulse purchase (or "drunk eBay") territory. And for me, they're kinda in that no mans land of "I want something better that my OPs, do I spend a few hundred bucks on one of those, a few grand on an OP-1, or do I start looking at Behringer clones or 2nd hand pro music studio gear?"
Yes there are now pocket operators that don’t fit in a pocket…for clarity, that’s not what I was talking about but the practice thing still applies.
I have a friend that writes lots of music on the PO-33. They are fun, definitely toyish, but you can get good results:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBo8Rd7HxdU <- a friend that creates a lot of music on small "affordable" pieces of gear.
I have 3. I have never regretted a single cent of what I paid. I don't get them out and play often, but even the fun I had when they were new was 10 times better value in the dollars per hour of fun measurement that most other things.
(If you happen to be in Sydney Australia, reach out, I'd happily lend you mine for a few weeks if you want to try them and see if the novelty wears off too quickly to spend the money yourself.)
They make cool sounds but their interfaces are so wonky I find them nearly impossible to do anything coherent, or even be confident I've fully explored the features. Imagine trying to program a VCR to make music. For as much as Teenage Engineering's visual designs are amazing, their functional interface designs are crap.
They're definitely very capable but limited machines, I enjoyed mine a lot until the potentiometers started thinking there was a change in the degrees even when I wasn't moving them
They -are- decent modular chunks. They have a bit of opinion pushing you in certain directions as far as sound goes.
Each one does a pretty limited set of things and combining them can be annoying.
But you get a lot for the money you spend on them.
combining them can be annoying
The strong design opinions about how the Pocket Operators interact with other musical gear are a big part of why I haven’t had high enthusiasm for using the small PO’s when I’ve had small PO’s.
For me, Volca’s are a similar ecosystem but to a lesser extent…maybe because the Monotrons sit lower in Korg’s product portfolio while the PO’s are rock bottom of TE’s product line.
I gave my kids (5 and 2) two Volcas (Beats & Keys) to play with. The Keys is a bit too advanced (too easy to get no sound at all, or something that sounds horrible), but the Beats is a wonderful machine for kids, as it's virtually impossible to make it sound bad. Also great to teach them rhythm.
It’s pretty capable hardware, but in my personal opinion the UI sucks. It falls into the category of “why did you make this hard on purpose” and I resent it.
Yeah, I agree. The size and price are attractive and they are pretty capable, but the UI is a bit more complex than ideal. It either needs better labeling of functions/combos (which is hard to do with the size) or more buttons/knobs to reduce the number of combos. On that note, the cases do a bit to aid with the labeling, but they also increase the price by more than one might expect. With better UI, they could have been truly amazing.